The fact that media and law reports are full to the brim with examples of parents who should not be permitted to look after a tamaguchi can blind us to the fact that most people are good or fair parents whatever their personal problems and usually it is in the child’s best interests to have some sort of relationship with them
Secondly, its a slippery slope when you define better parents, since almost everyone on earth could have had better parents them they actually did.
Read the stories of some of the children who were adopted, especially from the 60’s and 50’s when it was normal that “good girls were not single mothers” and most teens who became pregnant gave up their chldren for adoption. Yes, some did not care to find their birth parents, but OTOH there are huge movements dedicated to allowing adoptive children to find their birth parents, and as much pressure comes from the child’s side as the parents’. Plus, there are decent-sized businesses like Ancestry.com devoted to allowing people to trace their roots. It’s a deep need that you can’t really understand if you know your parents and family background.
Next, there’s the issue of drawing the line. The case described sounds a lot like many of the divorce stories I’ve heard about or witnessed. The other side of it is that often the custodial parent is sufficiently obnoxious to drive away the other parent. Parental alienation is a cause du jour nowadays. Similarly, in the 80’s and 90’s there were several prominent cases where adoptive parents were forced to give back a child when the mother straightened out and wanted the child back - usually because the father had not properly given up his rights too.
So where do we draw the line? Just how bad do you have to be for the court to take away your parental rights permanently and irrevocably? In the one extreme kids are forced to live with dangerous parents, and in the other extreme, every child is up for grabs, to be handed out to the couple who can show Family Services they can provide a better home life than the current custodials (i.e. no single parents any more, no poor parents, no working in remote locations…)
The courts have wisely said, a child belongs to the biological parents unless they do something so horrible that they cannot be trusted to keep their children safe.
I guess I’m confusing the more general term with the specific legal term. What I meant then was - I see the usefulness of adoption-at-birth, which combines parental dissolvement with parental guardianship. But at any other age, it’s not clear to me why these two things would be automatically considered simultaneously.
I can see why in practical terms. It would be a logistical nightmare if an unlimited number of people could have parental rights and responsibilities regarding a given child. Imagine if a couple with a child gets divorced (or was never married) and each gets remarried and the stepparents adopt the child. Now the child has four legal parents. Mostly, it will work out so long as those marriages are intact, although it may cause some problems in some situations which currently require both parents’ consent. However, if one or both of those marriages end up in divorce, you’ll end up with a child who lives with one or two of those parents while two or three of the parents have visitation rights. I wouldn’t want to be the kid who has to arrange my life around the scheduled visits of two or three people. And that’s assuming that the number of parents stops at four- there are people who get married three or four times. I’d hate to see what that visitation schedule would look like.
The only reasons for a stepparent adoption is for the stepparent to have all of the rights and responsibilities of a parent or to terminate a biological parents rights. It goes both ways- just as a stepparent cannot adopt without a bioparent losing parental rights , an individual bioparent generally can’t surrender his or her parental rights without someone else (like a stepparent) who is willing to assume them.
If the aim is not for the new “parent” to have full parental rights, there are other ways to accomplish this.
I’m in this same situation.
My wife had her son, who turns 6 this month, with a complete loser that has met him once. Drunk night stand and all that. She had wanted to abort (she’s very happy she kept him), he didn’t and so she had him. BD then dropped off the face of the Earth and never paid a dime of support money.
We’ve been together since he was 8 months old, so I do feel more like he’s mine than not.
We were just married in October and this guy has hemmed and hawed about his parental rights the whole time. I want to adopt him to make things easier for us, but he won’t rescind them. He won’t see my kid, pays now because of wage garnishment, and makes no effort at contact.
I’m not hopefully we could get a court to dismiss his rights, so I’m trying to appeal to him nicely about it. Which my wife hates, but I think will be most effective. From what I’ve looked into, I’d have a better chance of adopting a lion than my son.
It sucks.
So no doubt he owes past-due child support. Offer him a deal – you will agree to drop this debt, if he will relinquish his parental rights.
Point out that now that they know where he works, they will seize his income tax refund to pay toward this past due child support. And even death won’t let him escape – they will seize any insurance money or inheritance he leaves to cover this, before it goes to his heirs.
Note a couple of considerations about such an offer:
If she received any kind of public assistance as a single mother (AFDC, Food stamps, etc.), then the county has to also agree to drop this past-due child support. They usually won’t; they can afford to wait to seize income tax refunds year after year, life insurance when he dies, etc.
You are giving away money that rightfully belongs to the kid. He might need it for college or something someday.
If you think you can replace that money, or if you think there is little chance of ever collecting it, that may not matter. But you are still, on his behalf, giving up the rights to some money that he could collect someday.